She whipped around in surprise. She hadn’t seen me sitting in the rocking chair on the porch. Recovering, she pulled out her car keys, then opened an umbrella.
“I visit this silly Baptist church buffet up in Newport.” She shrugged, her face turning red. “I’ve turned it into my personal biosphere. Like I find a guy and see if I can get him to say ‘I love you’ by the end of the night. Or I approach a woman and see if I can get her to leave her husband. I’m trying to prove a theory about human nature. That anyone is capable of anything at any time, given a certain set of conditions.”
She was lying. I could tell.
“Can I come with you?” I asked.
“I prefer to be alone, actually.”
“What about when you were hiking around with binoculars? What were you doing?”
“Bird-watching.”
She was lying about that too. She seemed fully aware I didn’t believe her, yet she stared back at me, undaunted.
“Aren’t you worried?” I asked, trying to ignore the anger in the pit of my stomach. “Upset? Scared? We’ve lost them all now.”
She smiled thinly. “I suggest you resolve yourself to your fate, Bee.”
And with that she turned and hurried down the steps to her car.
The next wake, I headed straight to my truck. While Martha was inside getting the raincoat, I hid in a driveway down the street, and when she pulled out, I followed her.
Unfortunately, my confrontation appeared to have tipped her off, because as soon as I pulled up behind her on the interstate, though I was three cars back, she took the first exit and drove in meandering circles around deserted office parks before pulling into Birchwood Plaza. She spent the next four hours wandering Urban Outfitters and Barnes & Noble and eating a calzone in the food court.
She knew I was there, watching her. Yet she was unconcerned. The next wake, she did the same thing at a different mall. The third time, another.
There was no way Martha spent her Neverworld wandering malls. She was doing that because she knew I was following her. She seemed to be banking on my eventually growing bored and moving on.
So I did. I stopped. Instead, I devoted the next few wakes—or was it a few thousand?—to figuring out how to follow her unseen.
And so began my illustrious career in grand theft auto.
I was a panicky and apologetic thief.
Hundreds of times I was caught red-handed.
“Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my garage?”
“Hi. Sorry.”
Thankfully—probably because there was something intrinsically sad about me, which could only be blamed on the Neverworld—everyone let me off the hook.
The only car I could steal without getting caught was a rusted white van emblazoned with the words MCKENDRICK PEST CONTROL.
It belonged to the McKendricks, a hyper militia-family of seven living in a modest ranch house four doors down from Wincroft. All seven McKendricks were always home, so to get my hands on the keys was the closing act of Cirque du Soleil.
It took me forever to get it right.
One: hide in rhododendrons outside the kitchen, waiting for Bud McKendrick to wander into the living room for his Camel Lights. Two: dart into the kitchen pantry, trying not to trip on the bags of Healthy Weight cat food or the Macaroni and Cheese Storage Bucket with Gamma Lid from Target. Three: wait for Pete McKendrick to grab a Kit-Kat and head to the basement to watch The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Bud to go upstairs for a nap, and Gerry and Paul, the twins, to go play soccer in the front yard in the rain. Four: slip into the den, scaring Tupac, the cat, who jumps six feet into the air and climbs the curtains. Five: snatch the car keys off the table and duck behind the sofa as Laurel McKendrick takes forty dollars from her husband’s wallet. “Heading to the store!” Six: run back into kitchen and try to avoid four-year-old Kendall McKendrick.
“Who are you?” she asked me, eyes wide in surprise.
There was no avoiding Kendall. No matter what, she always caught me.
It was the most incendiary moment of all: finding the perfect recipe of words that would stop her from wailing like a smoke alarm. I had tried everything. Nothing worked.
“I’m an angel.”
“I work for the tooth fairy.”
“I’m the Elf on the Shelf, and I need to borrow your daddy’s truck.”
How many times had I expertly trapezed my way through the McKendricks’, only to crash to the ground, thanks to Kendall yelling her head off, prompting every McKendrick to descend on me.
“Dad! Dad!”
I’d run for my life as the McKendricks—all with variations on the same bulldog marine face—swarmed their front yard.
“Stop! Burglar!” they shouted through the rain.
“Dad, you’re letting her get away!”
Good old Bud McKendrick never called the police. Probably because after five kids, it took more than some teenage housebreaker to rattle him. Frowning quizzically after me from the porch, more than a little blasé, he always let me go.
Finally there came the wake when I told Kendall the truth.
“My name is Beatrice Hartley. I’m trapped between life and death in a place called a Neverworld. I’m trying to make it out of here, and to make a long story short, I need you to be quiet and go watch cartoons with your brothers. Now.”
She nodded mutely and padded downstairs.
Light-headed with amazement, I snatched Bud’s Rams baseball cap off a chair, grabbed his Oakley sunglasses, unlatched the door to the detached garage, and ran out. I pulled on Bud’s coveralls, hat, sunglasses, climbed behind the wheel of the van. Starting the engine, I was just wondering how in the world I was going to drive past the twins playing soccer, when Paul punted the ball into a neighbor’s yard. I inched down the drive, turned right, pulled into another drive a few houses down, my heart hammering.
A minute later Martha drove past me.
I followed her Honda Accord all the way to Providence, to Brown University, to the third floor of a redbrick building on Thayer Street, to a corner office.
ARNOLD BELORODA, PH.D. read the brass plaque on the door.
I watched Martha knock. A male voice answered “Yes?” and she entered. I heard her say hi as the door closed, and though I slipped closer in the crowded hallway, straining to hear the muffled voices inside, I couldn’t make out any more.
I Googled the name. Arnold Winwood Beloroda. He was an award-winning psychiatrist and professor emeritus specializing in group dynamic theory. He taught a host of classes at Brown. Making Ethical Decisions: The Good, Bad, and the Ugly. The Psychology of Manipulation and Consent. The Fantasy of Free Will. A senior seminar, Laboratory for Experiments in Social Persuasion. He had published thirteen nonfiction books, winning a slew of awards for one from the nineties, Heroes and Villains. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was about “the master-slave dynamics of concentration camps” and other situations in which “a large populace allows themselves to be controlled by a select few.”
I scanned Beloroda’s articles in the Harvard Review, the Economist, and Scientific American. What was so compelling about him? What was so critical that Martha had gone to such lengths to hide him?
Then it hit me. It felt like a pair of hands had begun to squeeze my neck.
While the rest of us had been wasting time warring against the reality of our circumstances, Martha had been using the Neverworld’s infinity to study.
Beloroda had been teaching her how to manipulate the group so we would choose her.